Nathan Brown
CTO And Co-founder at Defined Networking
Redwood City, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolNathan Brown is a seasoned CTO and co-founder with 12+ years of hands-on experience building and scaling Linux-based services to tens of millions of daily users and tens of billions of API calls. He combines deep systems and backend expertise—demonstrated at Slack, Zynga, and Betable—with practical security and auditing work, contributing to high-profile open-source projects like HashiCorp Vault and rsyslog. Nathan is equally comfortable writing and optimizing production code, hardening infrastructure, and improving observability and audit trails to make large systems both performant and debuggable. His open-source contributions show a pattern of pragmatic improvements—better error messages, robust logging, OpenSearch compatibility, and netlink performance—that reflect a focus on operational stability. Based in Redwood City, he brings entrepreneur-level ownership from founding Defined Networking while retaining the day-to-day engineering discipline of a senior staff engineer.
12 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
Living Life, Living Life at Hard knocks
Github Skills (37)
json10
opensearch10
python10
testing10
amazon-elasticsearch10
c1110
rsyslog10
networking10
request-handler10
secrets10
c1710
elasticsearchquery10
go10
aws-elasticsearch10
audit-logging10
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
slackhq/go-audit
Mar 2016 - Dec 2019
go-audit is an alternative to the auditd daemon that ships with many distros
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:96 commits, 32 PRs, 47 pushes in 3 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Nathan refactored core components of the go-audit project, including the `client.go`, `marshaller.go`, and `parser.go` files. These changes appear focused on improving the efficiency of the netlink communication and message processing, likely for performance improvements. The user also introduced and worked with the `AuditFilter` object for filtering messages, indicating an effort to improve the utility of the log messages.
golangauditsecuritydaemonlinux
slackhq/nebula
Nov 2019 - Jan 2023
A scalable overlay networking tool with a focus on performance, simplicity and security
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 release, 429 reviews, 130 commits in 3 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Nathan made several contributions to the Nebula project, mainly focused on improving error messages and code clarity. They implemented a more informative error message for configuration file loading, enhancing the user experience. Additionally, the user added a feature to find the most specific network and optimized codebase through Go fmt, demonstrating a focus on stability and maintainability. This work is indicative of back-end development tasks.
scalablesecuritynetworkingoverlayperformance
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